The dark side of India: Photo series on caste slavery by Witness Image,PVCHR and Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation

They are called “Dalits” and 160 million across India. They are members of thelowest caste of the Hindu social and religious system, thrown from the local traditions to the most infamous places in the country to perform the most degrading and odious works. That of the Dalit is considered a caste like all others but reality tells differently.

It is the marginalisation to condemn these people to accept poverty and misery. In Varanasi, the Indian city that lies on the banks of the Ganges, there are furnaces in which these new slaves, guilty of belonging to the “caste of the impure”, producing and transporting bricks on the back or on the head for an economic figure barely useful for survival. Youngwomen and children, often children, working ceaselessly for hours, surrounded by highly harmful dust, and under the sun that chokes throughout South Asia. There is no air between the stones of Varanasi, but most a health protection system, hygiene and safety lack completely. Everyone seems to know, but there are very few who fight against this injustice.

The dark side of India is a photo-reportage by Luca Catalano Gonzaga funded byNando andElsa Peretti Foundation in collaboration with the NGO PVCHR that wants to tell about the slavery of the “Dalit” in what is considered the most populous democracy in the world: India.

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

–The Buddha

“It is possible for those who are different in all kinds of ways, to cohere as a unified community.”
– Archbishop Desmond Tutu

“I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
– Nelson Mandela